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Reporting bugs

To report a bug, email the ​boinc_alpha email list
or directly to David and Rom.
Note: when you post to boinc_alpha, attachments are stripped from your email;
include text inline rather than as attachments.
There's a 1 MB limit.
Please include:

The context: what platform, what version of BOINC, anything else that might be relevant.

What sequence of actions caused the problem.

The exact nature of the problem.

The relevant parts of your message logs (see below).

If you don't include this information, we probably won't be able to fix the bug..
In general we're only interested in bug reports for the current public release,
or for the latest testing release.

Crashes

The BOINC client software consists of two programs:

the client, which runs applications and does network communication;

the manager, which provides a graphical user interface (GUI) to the client.

On windows, these are called boinc.exe and boincmgr.exe respectively.

Usually if the Manager shows "can't connect" it means the client has crashed.
You can verify this as follows.
Windows: run the Task Manager (ctrl-shift-esc) and check that there's no process named 'boinc.exe'.
Mac/Linux: run ps and check that there's no process named 'boinc'.

If the client or manager crashes, information about
the crash is written to a file in the BOINC data directory:
stderrgui.txt for the manager, stderrdae.txt for the client.
Email David and Rom,
describing the situation and attaching the relevant file.

Work-fetch and task scheduling bugs

The most common client problems involve

work fetch: deciding when to request tasks,
what project to request from, and how much work to request.

task scheduling: deciding what tasks to run at a given point.

The best way to report these types problems is to reproduce them using the
BOINC Client Emulator,
then send us a link to the result.
This will allow us to debug the problem on our own computers,
which generally makes it easy to fix.

If the emulator doesn't reproduce the bug,
tell David; we may need to improve the emulator.
If you can't reproduce the problem with the emulator:

Message logs

If you find a bug or unexpected behavior in the BOINC client,
it will help us if you tell BOINC to generate more detailed messages,
and then include the message log in your email.
To do this, use a text editor like Notepad to create a file
cc_config.xml in your BOINC data directory.
It has the following form:

Download in other formats:

Site migrated to: https://github.com/BOINC/boinc-dev-doc/wikiCopyright (c) 2014 University of California. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.